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Daily Archives: April 2, 2013

* Keach Hagey reports News Corp. is exploring the sale of its Dow Jones Local Media group — the outfit formerly known as Ottaway community newspapers. “The company has hired Waller Capital, the New York-based investment bank, to shop the papers, in hopes of selling them before the company spins off its publishing assets into a separate company this summer,” she writes. (wsj.com)
* New York Times foreign desk changes include John Burns doing more enterprise sports reporting. (observer.com)
* Gunmen raid four newspaper offices in Baghdad. (AP via yahoo.com)
* The Press of Atlantic City cuts its workforce by 15% as it prepares to be sold. (pressofatlanticcity.com)
* Give OC Register credit for not “trying to suck and blow at the same time,” says Mathew Ingram. (paidcontent.org)
* TV news largely ignores labor issues, according to a Newspaper Guild-commissioned study. (newsguild.org)
* The Awl finds that the higher up the masthead you are at a digital publication, the less you tweet. (theawl.com)
* “It’s time to find a new way to measure the inherent value of our news organizations.” (megunlimited.com)
* Ken Layne recalls his L.A. Examiner days. (theawl.com)
* Did the University of New Mexico’s Daily Lobo go too far with its April Fools issue? (krqe.com)

Daily Kos reported on Monday that the Los Angeles Times had rejected its ad urging that Tribune Co. not sell the Times to the Koch brothers.
I emailed the Times on Tuesday and found out that the paper never turned down the ad [in dispute] — and that’s it’s running in Wednesday’s paper.

Times spokesperson Nancy Sullivan says the Daily Kos/Courage Campaign ad was submitted to the paper’s self-service advertising portal on Friday. It was reviewed, then sent to Ad Standards to be vetted — as are all advocacy ads.

The ad creators were told that two changes were needed: they had to include contact information, and they had to provide the newspaper with documentation or citations for claims made in the ad.

“At no time were they told the ad wouldn’t run,” says Sullivan.

The ad was resubmitted on Monday. The Standards department checked the citations that were provided, then sent the ad to the legal department for final review. It got approval and will run in the main section on Wednesday, says Sullivan. (She notes that Daily Kos never contacted her office for comment before running its “ad rejected” story.)

UPDATE: Gabe Smalley of Courage Campaign tells me that the ad was initially rejected by a Times rep who would only identify himself as “Mickey.”

“He said that it might be a conflict of interest and that ‘we don’t have to accept any type of ad if we don’t want to.'”

Smalley adds: “They’re denying they rejected the ad, which is absolutely ludicrous. When the pressure ramped up, they quietly accepted the ad.”

The Associated Press announced this Stylebook change on Tuesday afternoon:

AP notice

“Illegal immigrant” no more

The AP Stylebook today is making some changes in how we describe people living in a country illegally.

Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explains the thinking behind the decision:The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal” to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.

Why did we make the change?

The discussions on this topic have been wide-ranging and include many people from many walks of life. (Earlier, they led us to reject descriptions such as “undocumented,” despite ardent support from some quarters, because it is not precise. A person may have plenty of documents, just not the ones required for legal residence.)

Those discussions continued even after AP affirmed “illegal immigrant” as the best use, for two reasons.

A number of people felt that “illegal immigrant” was the best choice at the time. They also believed the always-evolving English language might soon yield a different choice and we should stay in the conversation.

Also, we had in other areas been ridding the Stylebook of labels. The new section on mental health issues argues for using credibly sourced diagnoses instead of labels. Saying someone was “diagnosed with schizophrenia” instead of schizophrenic, for example.

And that discussion about labeling people, instead of behavior, led us back to “illegal immigrant” again.

We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance.

So we have.

Is this the best way to describe someone in a country without permission? We believe that it is for now. We also believe more evolution is likely down the road.

Will the new guidance make it harder for writers? Perhaps just a bit at first. But while labels may be more facile, they are not accurate.

I suspect now we will hear from some language lovers who will find other labels in the AP Stylebook. We welcome that engagement. Get in touch at stylebook@ap.org or, if you are an AP Stylebook Online subscriber, through the “Ask the Editor” page.

Change is a part of AP Style because the English language is constantly evolving, enriched by new words, phrases and uses. Our goal always is to use the most precise and accurate words so that the meaning is clear to any reader anywhere.

#

The updated entry is being added immediately to the AP Stylebook Online and Manual de Estilo Online de la AP, the new Spanish-language Stylebook. It also will appear in the new print edition and Stylebook Mobile, coming out later in the spring. It reads as follows:

illegal immigration Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission.

Except in direct quotations, do not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.

Do not describe people as violating immigration laws without attribution.

Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?

People who were brought into the country as children should not be described as having immigrated illegally. For people granted a temporary right to remain in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, use temporary resident status, with details on the program lower in the story.

—-

From a Tuesday post on the Minnesota Public Radio (MRP) website: “Today, MPR ran an Associated Press story — Bill: Instate tuition for illegal immigrants — that used the term [‘illegal immigrant’] three times.”

Daily Beast and Newsweek editor Tina Brown tells Bloomberg TV that “we’re living in a time when everybody is so obsessed with delivery systems and gaming systems and business. It is actually very, very soul destroying. We do not have enough respect for content anymore.

“In the end, without the great content there are no numbers. You see again and again in the media this obsession with the numbers, this obsession with the audiences, this obsession with the demo, without the talent without the people who do it your company is worth nothing.”

She added that “there is less respect for the editorial process then there ever was amongst business folks … and there must be some respect for the integrity of news or we will be a very ill-informed nation.”

Being ahead of the curve: “Sometimes you can be ahead of the curve too. At certain times in my career I’ve done things which I now see were the right things, but they were done too early. So you also have to make sure your timing is right. I think some of the concept I had with a company I started — Talk Media – was actually right. It was about a synergy between print and books and TV and so on, but at that time it was too early a concept. Now that’s kind of what everybody wants to do.”

“When I travel, which is now two or three times a week, the goal is to carry nothing with me — or as close to nothing as possible,” says NBC chief digital officer Vivian Schiller. “No laptops, just an iPad; no printouts, no books, they’re all on my Kindle. …..My purse has an iPhone, a comb, wallet, lipstick and a pen — if I’m lucky. I don’t wear much jewelry; I’ve even ditched the watch.”

The Daily Princetonian is soliciting letters about Susan Patton’s husband-hunting piece — opinions “that touch on Patton’s ideas, the way the media covered the letter, the status of gender relations on campus and the topic of career-family balance.” The letters will be published in a special section later this week.

I have been warmed by the number of letters I’ve gotten from women who are on campus and women who are on other campuses saying it’s exactly what they’ve always thought, but it’s so politically unpopular to say such a thing that they haven’t been having the conversation, but now they are. I’ve also gotten so many letters from parents saying that this is precisely the conversation they wanted to have with their own daughters and didn’t even know how to begin; they didn’t even know how to broach the topic.